Land and Watershed Management - Practices of Irrigation and On-farm Water Management - page 195

water course and where, as humans settled, simple logic demanded that they become
part of a community.
Everyone is an integral part of the watershed in which he or she lives. We often
think of rivers as simply water flowing through a channel, but river systems are
complex and intimately connected to and affected by the characteristics of their
surrounding watersheds - the land that water flows over and under on its way
to the river. Many human activities that occur on the land, such as agriculture,
transportation, mining, and construction, affect our river systems and how they
function.
Watershed management activities can be considered at the state, river basin,
individual watershed level or regional scale. Using watersheds, we can take a
broader view of the environment, which is complicated and interconnected with
our activities across local and regional scales.
An understanding of natural resource responses to agricultural activities at
regional and watershed scales is necessary for successful and efficient manage-
ment of the resources. For improving watershed protection and restoration, it is a
prerequisite to know how agricultural systems influence soil and water resources.
We can best understand the overall health of aquatic systems on a watershed
basis.
6.2 Background and Issues Related to Watershed Management
Watersheds have been viewed as useful systems for planning and implementing
natural resource and agricultural development for many centuries. Recognition of
the importance of watersheds can be traced back to some of the earliest civiliza-
tions; ancient Chinese proverbs state that “Whoever rules the mountain also rules
the river,” and “Green mountains yield clean and steady water.”
Expanding human populations and their increasing demands for natural
resources have led to exploitation and degradation of land and water resources.
Revenga et al. ( 1998 ) , in an assessment of 145 watersheds globally, emphasized that
expanding human demands for resources have intensified watershed degradation,
with the result that some of the watersheds with the greatest biological production
are becoming the most seriously degraded. Development projects and programs by
all types of organizations (national governments, multinational and bilateral agen-
cies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), etc.) have proliferated in response to
these problems.
Current and expanding scarcities of land and water resources, and the human
response to these scarcities, threaten sustainable development and represent
paramount environmental issues for the twenty-first century. An added concern is
to develop means of coping with the extremes and uncertainty of weather patterns,
such as the 1997-1998 El Nino effect that resulted in severe droughts in some parts
of the world and record flooding elsewhere. Watershed management provides both
a framework and a pragmatic approach for applying technologies to cope with these
issues, which are discussed below.